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Plains Indian Culture, As Seen Through the Ingenuity of the Tepee

Source:The New York Times

Author:Ken Johnson

Date: 2011-03-16

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The display suggests that there is no important difference between the old and the new. But how can that be so? The Plains Indian culture that gave rise to these kinds of objects was practically destroyed by the United States government’s campaign to clear land for settlement by white people over a century ago.

“Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” is at the Brooklyn Museum. Above, a decorative horse mask from about 1900

You know there’s trouble when the first object you encounter in a museum exhibition looks as if it had been misplaced from the gift shop. That problem runs deep in “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains,” at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition mixes kitschy pieces by contemporary American Indian artists into an otherwise outstanding selection of mostly 19th-century works of art and craft by members of Blackfoot, Crow, Arapaho, Lakota and other tribes that once nomadically roamed the prairies from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Most of the historic material is from the museum’s collection of about 700 Plains objects.

The introductory item in question, commissioned for the show and created by the contemporary Kiowa artist Teri Greeves, is a miniature tepee, less than four feet high, whose white, deer-hide shell has cartoonish figures of modern Indians and traditional symbols rendered in colored beads. As a cheerfully saccharine expression of Indian culture today, the object has a relationship to the historic material that is perplexing at best.

Beyond some basic historical context, the exhibition offers no revelatory perspective on its contents. That might be partly because, as the organizers, Nancy B. Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller (both Brooklyn Museum curators) point out in their catalog preface, part of the planning process involved focus groups and visitor surveys “to determine the level of visitor interest in and knowledge of the tepee and Plains culture.” They also invited a team of American Indian scholars, artists and tribal members to vet their plans. The result is an exhibition that speaks down to its audience, assuming a low level of sophistication, and that does as little as possible to offend or stir controversy.

The second and most imposing work a visitor confronts is a full-size, 27-foot-high tepee painted in bold colors on white canvas that looks as if it had been borrowed from a roadside souvenir stand. Produced for the exhibition by Lyle Heavy Runner, a member of the Blackfoot tribe, it bears a painted sacred design of abstracted mountains and the symbol of a bleeding buffalo skull that has been handed down for generations. Two smaller tepees, also of recent manufacture, are in the show, and they contain various artifacts, new and old, to show how tepees were typically furnished.

Originally, tepees were made from stitched-together buffalo hides wrapped around long, tapering poles that leaned from a circular footprint to intersect at the top. This ingenious design allowed for easy setup, dismantling and portability at a time when tribes moved seasonally to follow clement weather and the once-enormous herds of bison that were their chief source of food and material for clothing and accessories. Today almost no buffalo-hide tepees are left, and those that remain are too fragile to travel.

Tucked into one corner of the exhibition space on the other side of the big, introductory tepee, cases display historic artifacts relating to Indian horse culture, including a marvelous decorative mask from about 1900 made to cover a horse’s head and neck. It has deer-hide fringe and a red-white-and-blue glass-bead pattern featuring abbreviated United States flags, a common motif that might have symbolized enemies killed or, later, a newfound patriotism. There is also a gorgeous pemmican bag from about 1883, with a striped pattern of bright orange quills on gray horsehair; blue, beaded borders; and fringes made of small, conical metal elements.

Also in this section is a blue-and-white carved wood piece called “Horse Head Effigy Stick,” by Butch Thunder Hawk, of the Hunkpapa Lakota. A casual viewer might mistake it for a war club, with a horse-head-shaped business end, used in the 19th century when intertribal warfare was a way of life. It turns out that it was made in 1998, which, if you think about it, raises puzzling — but here unanswered — questions. What is the relationship of this rather slick modern object to the historic artifacts? And what about the buffalo-horn ladle with a glossy cube pattern imitating the 20th-century Dutch illusionist M. C. Escher that Kevin Pourier, a member of the Oglala Lakota, created in 2009?

The display suggests that there is no important difference between the old and the new. But how can that be so? The Plains Indian culture that gave rise to these kinds of objects was practically destroyed by the United States government’s campaign to clear land for settlement by white people over a century ago.

If these questions bother you, you will be especially irritated when you find that to get to the final two rooms of the show, you must pass through a gift shop where you can purchase not only books about Indians but also toy-size birch-bark canoes, miniature tepees, blankets, beaded trinkets, moccasins and even popcorn in tepee-shaped cardboard containers. Considering the tragic, still painful history evoked, if not directly addressed, by the exhibition, you’d think that the organizers would have given some thought to locating this tasteless concession elsewhere.

All this creates annoying mental static, which is a shame, because the historic materials are uniformly first-rate. Lavishly decorated war outfits and weapons, women’s dresses, saddles, storage bags, baby carriers, children’s toys, sporting goods and much more attest to a wonderfully soulful and inventive artistic vitality. A small section on the Native American Church, which still uses consciousness-altering peyote in its Christian ceremonies, would be worth a whole exhibition unto itself. (A rectangular wooden container identified as a “peyote box” from 1940, with geometrically incised sides, resembles an early work by H. C. Westermann, the sculptor of eccentric, folk-art-like containers.)

If you know very little about the Plains Indians, this show is a good-enough introduction. Otherwise bring your selective-attention goggles.